Donald Trump has a problem with women voters. And he is now on a campaign to win them over.
At a town hall airing on Fox News on Wednesday he took questions from an all-woman audience and from a female moderator, Harris Faulkner, in the battleground state of Georgia.
During the event, Trump declared himself to be the “father of IVF”, praised a female senator as a “fantastically attractive person”, and faced a pointed question about his abortion stance.
Reading their questions from cards, with many admitting feeling nervous during the pre-recorded event, audience members asked about childcare, immigration, and the economy – all familiar ground for the former president.
When it came to inflation and the cost of living, Trump promised to expand fossil-fuel drilling in the United States and “bring down your energy costs”. To a woman asking about helping parents with the high costs of raising children, Trump backed child tax credits and said he would expand them.
When asked about fertility treatment, however, Trump stumbled.
“I’m the father of IVF,” he declared. His campaign later said he was joking.
He went on to say that he had asked Republican Alabama Senator Katie Britt to explain the fertility treatment to him, describing her as “a fantastically attractive person”.
He also said the Republican Party stood firmly behind in vitro fertilization (IVF) treatments.
But the moment underscored Trump’s vulnerability with female voters.
Democrats have hammered him on the issue, noting that he appointed US Supreme Court justices who voted to overturn national abortion rights – and arguing that opened the door to challenges to IVF.
“The reality is, his actions have been very harmful to women and families in America on this issue,” his opponent, Vice-President Kamala Harris, said on Tuesday.
Asked by reporters what she thought of Trump’s IVF comment, she described it as “quite bizarre”.
Taken as a whole, women have been sceptical of Trump since his first run for the White House in 2016. There has been one exception: exit polls suggested he won with white women in 2020.
The townhall was broadcast on Fox News, which provided Trump with a friendly forum where he could work to improve how women view him.
One questioner told him: “I know you will fight for us in the future.”
But another pointedly asked about his position on abortion.
“Why is the government involved in women’s basic rights?” she said.
Trump replied by walking the tightrope he has maintained for much of the campaign, taking credit for ending nationwide abortion rights, while also saying abortion policy should be left to the states.
Polls suggest Trump is still behind with women in 2024, during an election where the margin of victory may prove razor thin.
A New York Times/Siena College poll taken in late September and early October indicated that 56% of likely women voters backed Harris and 40% backed Trump.
Black women appeared to remain firmly on Harris’s side, with 83% backing her, compared to just 12% for Trump, in the same poll.
The gender gap matters in Georgia, one of the battleground states that could decide the election and where polling suggests the race is effectively tied.
Harris holds a 10-point lead over Trump, of 54% to 44%, among women voters there, a recent poll conducted by Emerson College/The Hill suggests.
Trump, to a degree, seems aware that he needs to gain ground with women voters.
He has said at several rallies that they like him and brushed off criticism that he struggles with the constituency.
Trump has also sought to turn issues where he tends to do well with voters – like immigration, crime and the economy – into kitchen-table ones appealing to women.
“The women are going to like Trump,” he said at a recent rally in Pennsylvania, another battleground state.
“They don’t want millions of people coming through our border. They don’t want militaries pushing us around. They don’t want crime in the middle of our streets…They want to see a country that works.”
That pitch makes sense to Kim Pelletier, a 57-year-old Republican from Pennsylvania.
An ardent supporter of the former president’s re-election campaign, she feels Trump will take care of female voters.
“I personally think he’s going to do a heck of a lot more for women than has been done in the past three and a half years,” Ms Pelletier told the BBC.
Susanne Green, another Pennsylvania Trump supporter, likes his policies on immigration.
But she had a warning for Trump when it came to winning over more women like herself.
“We don’t like his harshness, we don’t like the mean tweets, the rudeness. We don’t like him making fun of other people,” she said.
Focusing on his policies, she believed, would win him more points with women.
“Sometimes things he says are cringeworthy and I don’t like it,” she said. “But on the other hand his policies are effective and are what we need now.”
